The Admirals

by Walter R. Borneman

  “Dereliction of duty” was not an offense subject to court-martial, but it might just as well have been. Under considerable pressure to do so, both Kimmel and Short applied for retirement and were granted the same at their permanent grade ranks of rear admiral and major general, respectively.22

  Among Kimmel’s staunchest and most vocal supporters was Bill Halsey, Kimmel’s friend since Annapolis and in whose wedding Kimmel had been a groomsman. Halsey stood by Kimmel from the time Enterprise steamed into Pearl Harbor on December 8 until the day Halsey drew his last breath, feeling that no one had worked harder than Kimmel to prepare the fleet for war and that the success of the attack had been due to a lack of patrol planes. Halsey boldly told the Roberts Commission that he himself had been prepared for a Japanese attack while en route to Wake “because of one man: Admiral Kimmel.” Years after the war, Halsey was still telling Kimmel that he believed “you and Short were the greatest military martyrs this country has ever produced.”23

  Ernie King was also initially sympathetic. “I wish to express in writing—what I feel you already know—that you have my sincere regrets over what has occurred,” he told Kimmel in a “Dear Kim” note as he was preparing to assume his COMINCH command; “it is something that might well have happened to any of us!” Two months later, on the eve of Kimmel’s retirement, King bemoaned the omissions of the Roberts Commission and claimed that the result of the attack would have been the same no matter who had been in command. “No one,” King concluded with his own emphasis, “thought the Japs would strike—or even that they were ready to strike!”24

  King’s comforting words reflected a view that was then quite rampant: America had suffered a grave defeat; it could have come about only as the result of a sneak attack. Indeed, much would be written about the “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor and the extent of U.S. culpability, but the fact remains that increasingly throughout the fall of 1941, the American military hierarchy, from President Roosevelt on down, expected the Japanese to attack somewhere in the Pacific. The pure audacity of a strike against Pearl Harbor seems to have escaped the attention of most, and even when that possibility was discussed, enemy submarines coming into the harbor and sabotage from Japanese residents on the island were the suspected vehicles, not a carrier-borne air wave—even though King himself had simulated just such an attack in war games three years earlier.

  By 1944, when a Navy-led court of inquiry concluded “that no offenses have been committed nor serious blame incurred on the part of any person in the naval service,” King, as chief of naval operations, disagreed. He didn’t go so far as to repeat the “dereliction of duty” charge, but he did find both Kimmel and King’s own predecessor, Admiral Stark, “lack[ing] of the superior judgment necessary for exercising command commensurate with their rank and assigned duties.”25

  After the war, with the world and King himself much more mellow, King swung back to a defense of Kimmel in notes prepared for his autobiography but not published. King believed that Kimmel and Short had been “ ‘sold down the river’ as a political expedient!” Remembering that the army had had long-standing responsibility for the defense of the islands, King felt that it, including Short, had been particularly circumspect when it came to providing information or offering insight. “They very carefully said nothing about this during the investigation,” King maintained, “something for which I [emphasis in original] will never forgive them, for they could at least have taken part of the blame.”26

  General Short died in 1949, having remained largely quiet about the entire affair through no less than nine different investigations. Kimmel died in 1968, having spent almost thirty years after the attack attempting to wipe away the charge of dereliction of duty. It was a campaign that his surviving sons carried into the twenty-first century. The ultimate test of any military commander, however, is that he rises or falls with whatever glories or misfortunes befall his command. Sometimes he is responsible, sometimes he is not, but as the commander he is always accountable nonetheless. Had even one of thirty-six patrol planes been in the air—instead of on the ground—that morning and spotted the Japanese carrier force or the waves of inbound aircraft in time to allow fighters to scramble and every antiaircraft gun on ship and shore to be trained skyward as the first wave of Japanese planes swept over the island, Kimmel and Short—no matter what else their shortcomings in hindsight—would have gotten the credit. Having been caught flat-footed, they got the blame.

  Ever the considerate superior, no matter how difficult the situation, Nimitz no doubt supported a letter that his successor at BuNav, Rear Admiral Randall Jacobs, appears to have written to a bewildered Kimmel on January 15, 1942. Jacobs advised Kimmel that with his appearance before the Roberts Commission complete, he was being assigned to the Twelfth Naval District in San Francisco. Both men knew that this would be only temporary, but Jacobs omitted the word “temporary” from Kimmel’s orders so that his family might travel to San Francisco at government expense.

  “Naturally,” Jacobs concluded, “none of us here know all the facts connected with the Pearl Harbor incident, and I am doubtful, personally, whether all the facts ever will be known. Needless to say, I feel deeply for you.”27

  One other responsible party to the overall events of December 7 appeared beyond reproach. Regardless of what Douglas MacArthur had been doing in the Philippines for the past six years as a military adviser to the Philippine government, the general had been recalled to active duty by President Roosevelt in July 1941 and given command of U.S. Armed Forces Far East (USAFFE). As such, MacArthur had received a host of alert admonishments throughout the fall, including Marshall’s “war warning” message of November 27.

  In the wee hours of Monday, December 8, Manila time, MacArthur’s bedside telephone rang in his penthouse. “Pearl Harbor!” the general exclaimed when he heard the news. “It should be our strongest point.” A few minutes later, at 3:40 a.m., as MacArthur hurriedly dressed, a second call came from Brigadier General Leonard T. Gerow in the army’s War Plans Division in Washington. Gerow confirmed the news and told MacArthur that he “wouldn’t be surprised if you get an attack there in the near future.”

  Nine hours later, after other Japanese air attacks against northern Luzon were reported, several hundred Mitsubishi bombers and Zero fighters roared over Clark Field outside Manila and destroyed the bulk of American airpower in the Philippines—MacArthur’s air force—as it sat on the ground. Even after years of increasingly hostile Japanese intentions and fair evidence that something was building to a head in the Far East, some might be tempted to forgive MacArthur for being the victim of a surprise attack. But how could he still have his airplanes lined up wingtip to wingtip nine hours after being notified of the attack on Pearl Harbor? Two days later, with Philippine skies generally void of defending planes, another Japanese air attack destroyed the American naval base at Cavite.28

  MacArthur “might have made a better showing at the beaches and passes, and certainly he should have saved his planes on December 8,” a newly appointed brigadier general who had long served as the general’s aide confided to his diary. “But,” wrote Dwight D. Eisenhower, “he’s still the hero.”29

  The man was clearly fallible, but the legend was not. In the dark days of early 1942, when rallying cries and heroes were in short supply, the legend had to be preserved at all costs. FDR knew it. Leahy appears to have blindly affirmed it. King, Nimitz, and Halsey would all come to grips with it in their own ways. But for now, America desperately needed a hero, and Douglas MacArthur was the man of the hour. In short order, the United States Navy would provide a few heroes of its own.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Spread Thin

  After Admiral Chester W. Nimitz read his orders assuming command of the Pacific Fleet on the deck of the Grayling, he summoned various staff officers to an afternoon conference. Some were longtime members of Admiral Kimmel’s staff and as such had been as intimately involved in pre–December 7 preparations and pr
ecautions as the admiral himself. Others were from Admiral Pye’s staff and had seen their attempt at a relief effort evaporate well short of Wake Island. All gathered with a decided air of apprehension and uncertainty. Were they losers, just unlucky, or both?

  The new CINCPAC made his feelings clear on all counts. Nimitz promptly declared that he had complete confidence in all present and that he would need each and every one of them in the task ahead. What’s more, as the former chief of the Bureau of Navigation, Nimitz had likely been the one who had sent them to the Pacific Fleet in the first place, and they wouldn’t be there if they weren’t fully competent and qualified in their positions. Those who absolutely wanted to leave could, Nimitz told them, but “certain key members of the staff I insist I want to keep.”1

  Among those were Captain Charles H. “Soc” McMorris and Lieutenant Commander Edwin T. Layton, who had been Kimmel’s war plans and intelligence officers, respectively. McMorris had been among those concluding that an attack on Pearl Harbor was unlikely, while Layton had warned that something major was about to happen somewhere in the Pacific. Such evenhanded, across-the-board determination not to assign blame for the past but to treat everyone the same going forward proved a much-needed tonic for morale. It quickly spread throughout the entire Pacific Fleet. There was a new admiral in charge, they had his confidence, and he would lead them to victory.

  Nimitz’s quiet but firm action in immediately addressing his command was as significant a decision as any he made in those early days. Reaching out to all concerned and assuring them of their worth worked wonders to shore up morale, put as much of the Pearl Harbor disaster behind them as possible, and get his command looking forward instead of backward. Still, in the months ahead, they were all going to be spread thin.

  Even as Roosevelt and Churchill were affirming a Germany First strategy at the Arcadia Conference, the immediacy of military events focused eyes on the South Pacific. The Japanese onslaught continued unabated. Within weeks, the oil, rubber, and other natural resources of the Netherlands East Indies would be theirs, and the last bastion of British influence in the area, Singapore, despite Churchill’s adamant assurances to the contrary, would fall on February 15. MacArthur continued to hold portions of the Philippines by a dubious strategy of massing his forces on the dead-end peninsula of Bataan, but the Americans and their allies desperately needed a counterpunch.

  Having returned to Pearl Harbor from the stillborn Wake Island relief expedition a few hours after Nimitz assumed CINCPAC command, Bill Halsey reported to his new commander. If Halsey had any regrets that their roles were not reversed, he certainly did not show them. Instead, despite his continuing loyalty to Kimmel, Halsey seems to have readily embraced Nimitz in his new role.

  It helped, of course, that they were old friends from their days at Annapolis, when Halsey was a football player and Nimitz an interested observer. Although they had never served together and their families had never socialized, as had the Halseys and Spruances, they were at ease with each other and usually began their conversations by swapping a story or two—trademarks of both men.

  At this first encounter, they discussed the task ahead, and then Halsey departed Pearl Harbor to escort an approaching convoy from the West Coast the remaining miles to Oahu. After his return, Nimitz sent for him on January 9 and got right down to business without the usual exchange of stories.

  The Japanese had seized the British mandate of the Gilbert Islands within three days of Pearl Harbor. Their growing sphere of influence in the South Pacific pointed directly at Samoa and threatened the West Coast–Australia lifeline that King had directed Nimitz to preserve at all costs.

  The marine garrison on Samoa was being reinforced with troops from San Diego in a task force led by Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher aboard Yorktown, which King had hastily dispatched to the Pacific from the North Atlantic. Nimitz wanted Halsey to take Enterprise directly to Samoa, link up with Fletcher after his delivery, and then sail northwest to raid Japanese forces in the Gilberts and the nearby Marshall Islands, hopefully disrupting any plans for their advance against Samoa. “How does that sound?” Nimitz asked Halsey. “It’s a rare opportunity.”

  Halsey furrowed his bushy eyebrows. He wasn’t so sure. The Marshalls had been Japanese since the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, and it was a good bet that they had been heavily fortified despite agreements to the contrary. Little was known about them, and this dearth of information had even sparked theories that Amelia Earhart’s globe-circling flight was in fact a spy mission to overfly and photograph Japanese military installations there. (Leahy, it will be recalled, had unsuccessfully urged the American occupation of islands in this general area during the search for Earhart.)

  Unsure what he was up against, Halsey was also nagged by the results of a game-board exercise conducted a few months before Pearl Harbor. Then, an American raid against the Marshalls and their main base at Kwajalein had had the advantage of protection on its flank from amphibious planes based on Wake—no longer under American control. Still, Halsey could hardly be anything less than game. Just two days later, with Enterprise loaded down with planes, armaments, and supplies, Nimitz came down to see Halsey off and said, “All sorts of good luck to you, Bill!”2

  But good luck at first seemed to be in short supply. That same day, Saratoga was torpedoed while patrolling off Hawaii and went limping back to Pearl Harbor, and later the West Coast, for repairs. This cut the American carrier strength in the Pacific back to three—Enterprise, Lexington, and the arriving Yorktown. Then Halsey’s outbound cruise became a comedy of errors. A pilot carelessly broke radio silence to report engine trouble, a destroyer lost a man overboard, a turret explosion killed a seaman on the heavy cruiser Salt Lake City, a scout plane crashed on Enterprise, and one of the carrier’s torpedo planes went missing.

  As Halsey’s task force neared its rendezvous with Fletcher’s command, the bad luck continued. Another scout plane was lost; a torpedo plane scored a direct hit on a Japanese sub, but the bomb failed to detonate; and recognition problems with allies caused friendly-fire attacks against a British schooner and an Australian patrol plane.

  Then, lurking American submarines reported that the Marshalls might not be so heavily defended after all, and rather than just hitting the eastern edge at Wotje and Maloelap, Miles Browning, Halsey’s mercurial chief of staff, urged the admiral to strike straight into the island group and attack Kwajalein itself. “It was one of those plans,” Halsey admitted, “which are called ‘brilliant’ if they succeed and ‘foolhardy’ if they fail,” but it was also just the sort of audacity that appealed to him. Nimitz concurred and directed Halsey to expand the assault.3

  While Fletcher and Yorktown attacked the Gilberts and southern Marshalls, Halsey took Enterprise straight west almost within rifle shot of Wotje. It was dicey work because the Japanese closure in recent decades meant that any charts were old and suspect. Two hours before a dawn carrier strike was to be launched, the staff duty officer burst into Halsey’s flag plot from the bridge and exclaimed, “Sir, sand has just blown in my face!”

  Check it out, ordered the admiral, hurrying the officer back outside, even as he pondered his aircraft carrier piling up on some beach while making 25 knots. The officer soon returned with a sheepish grin. He had wet his fingers, touched the “sand” that had fallen on the deck, tentatively tasted it, and, spying one of the bridge crew stirring a cup of coffee, concluded that the “sand” was an errant helping of sugar.

  The laughter that followed calmed more than a few precombat jitters, and it also broke the bad-luck run of the outbound cruise. Nine torpedo bombers and thirty-seven dive-bombers took off for Kwajalein an hour later. While they surprised planes and ships in the harbor there, Halsey’s accompanying cruisers under the command of Raymond Spruance bombarded coastal defenses on Wotje. All through the day on February 1, 1942, Enterprise launched and retrieved planes that flew strike after strike, pausing only long enough to be refueled and rearmed, while their pi
lots gulped a hasty cup of coffee and some food.

  Finally, about three in the afternoon, after Enterprise had been jockeying in and out of the wind in a very confined area, the commander of one of the bombing squadrons returned from his third mission and, reporting to the bridge, asked, “Admiral, don’t you think it’s about time we got the hell out of here?”

  “My boy,” Halsey responded, “I’ve been thinking the same thing myself!” Halsey later claimed that the exchange was the beginning of the phrase “Haul Out with Halsey,” less delicately termed “Haul Ass with Halsey.”4

  But before they could make their escape, a flight of five twin-engine Mitsubishi G3M “Nell” bombers attacked the carrier, dropping fifteen bombs that fell close enough to cause minor damage and start a small fire. After forty-two years in the navy, it was Halsey’s first time to come under direct enemy fire. One Nell, with both engines smoking, turned back toward the carrier and bore down on the planes assembled on its flight deck.

  A young aviation mechanic named Bruno Gaido bravely jumped into the rear seat of an American SBD Dauntless dive-bomber and opened up with its machine gun. Despite a hail of fire, the Nell staggered onward. At the last possible moment, Enterprise’s skipper threw its helm over in a hard turn to starboard. The attacking bomber sliced the tail off Gaido’s plane, but then bounced off the port edge of the flight deck—according to Halsey, the first kamikaze of the war.

  When Enterprise and its cruiser consorts returned to Pearl Harbor on February 5, the place went wild with cheers and sirens. The Marshall affair would later be termed a mere “nuisance raid” in the grand strategy of things, but knowing that their efforts would not be unopposed gave the Japanese pause. More important, it gave Americans another huge boost in morale and ignited an offensive spirit. Perhaps most important of all, Halsey had shown that far from hiding carriers behind battleships, putting them at the core of a small, nimble task force capable of moving at 30 knots yielded an offensive capability that could strike surprise tactical blows almost anywhere.